A state-of-the-art drug store or grocery store is reasonably sophisticated with regard to bulk monitoring of inventory movements and management of inventory. Most items carry bar code identification to expedite annual inventory restocking, checkout and price checks. Customers select desired items from the shelves and/or hangers, carry them to a point of sale, such as a checkout station, where the customer self checks or a checkout clerk scans each item with a bar code scanner to identify and price the item and to charge it to the customer.
Scanning each item's bar code label at the point of sale captures the movement of the item out of store inventory and is used to initiate actions to replenish the reduced shelf stock. Drawbacks of this system are inventory movements captured at the point of sale, i.e., at the cash register, may not reflect shelf conditions because some withdrawals from a shelf may not be checked out at the cash register owing to pilferage, breakage, misplacement or items returned by customers to the wrong locations, and so on. Since stock outages are quite costly to vendors, it would be desirable for vendors to have access to even more up-to-date and accurate information on shelf stock such that vendors could maintain the shelf stock at desired levels.
A particular problem is posed by the need to monitor high value inventory since such inventory is most subject to loss, i.e., theft, and since once the high value inventory is taken from the premises, the probability for recovering the inventory is substantially diminished. Another shortcoming of conventional inventory monitoring techniques is presented by the case where a consumer selects a frozen item and then decides for whatever reason to discard the item at the nearest (typically non-freezer) shelf location. Absent quick action, this scenario is a cause for inventory loss and potential health hazard.
There is accordingly a need for an item monitoring system that can, without requiring operator intervention, track addition and removal of items to and from storage locations sufficiently well to be useful in a broad range of applications including retail, commercial, medical, military and industrial environments.